COLOMBIAN SECURITY FORCES SEEK GENTLER WAY

TOLEMAIDA, Colombia -- Gunfire erupts, and an army patrol captures a
wounded guerrilla in a forest clearing. Two soldiers prepare to
torture the rebel but a sergeant stops them, proclaiming, "The army
doesn't do that.

Curtains. Applause.

So ends one of 10 theatrical skits designed by the Colombian security
forces as part of a novel human rights course to teach soldiers and
police about the rights of combatants and civilians.

Seeking $500 million in U.S. aid over the next year, security force
commanders have launched a strong campaign to clean up their dark
human rights record in the escalating war against guerrillas and drug
traffickers.

And it's not all theatrics.

Armed forces chief Gen. Fernando Tapias has ordered military
intelligence agents, allegedly among the worst abusers, to stop
detaining suspects and stick to collecting and analyzing
information.

An army brigadier general and two top police officers were fired last
week for allegedly allowing rightist gunmen known as paramilitaries to
murder 36 suspected leftist rebel sympathizers in central Colombia
last year.

"On the paramilitaries our stand is very clear: The armed forces will
not tolerate any consorting with the paramilitaries, Ramirez said in
an interview with foreign journalists.

Thirty-five soldiers up to the rank of captain went on trial last
week at the army's Tolemaida Base, 65 miles southwest of Bogota, for
the murder of five civilians at a highway checkpoint in 1998.

Every army battalion is now required to appoint a human rights
officer to monitor enforcement of the rules of combat, and all new
soldiers must pass the human rights course before they go on combat
duty.

President Andres Pastrana waded into the campaign with a decree
banning all government officials from repeating the persistent charge
that Colombian human rights activists are allied with the leftist rebels.

Rights activists murdered

Several such activists have been murdered in recent years, most of
them allegedly by military officers or right-wing death squads, and
dozens more have received death threats.

The perceived menace is so great that when the head of the U.S.-based
Human Rights Watch Americas, Jose Miguel Vivanco, visited Colombia
last year he used a bulletproof car because of rumors that military
officers were plotting to kill him.

Most of the $368 million in U.S. counternarcotics aid to Colombia over
the past two years went to police units because of U.S. concerns about
the military's long history of abuses and its alleged links to the
paramilitaries.

A June report by the U.S. Government Accounting Office, an
investigative arm of Congress, said three of the six army brigades now
deployed against narcotics traffickers do not meet human rights
standards for receiving aid from Washington.

But armed forces leaders complain that such allegations are outdated,
noting that the share of reported human rights abuses blamed on
security forces plummeted from 54 percent in 1993 to 3.7 percent last
year.

Critics say the military and police simply subcontracted the dirty
part of the war to the paramilitaries, blamed for 18 percent of the
abuses reported in 1993 and 79 percent of the violations in 1998.

Guerrillas also blamed

Guerrillas of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces and National
Liberation Army were blamed for 27 percent of the violations in 1993
and 17.6 percent in 1998, a February report by the Colombian Lawyers'
Commission said.

But with the military now aiming for an expanded share of the $500
million that Colombia has requested from Washington, U.S. officials
and local human rights activists worry that the additional funds may
only lead to increased abuses.

And that may explain why the armed forces have recently taken dozens
of visiting Clinton administration officials, U.S. Congress members
and American journalists on tours of the human rights course.

But military leaders say that behind the publicity spin lies a genuine
effort to wage what Tolemaida Base commander Brig Gen. Euclides
Sanchez Vargas described to the visitors as "a clean, clear war.

One of five such courses launched a year ago -- the police and other
military bases run their own -- the program requires each soldier to
spend 100 hours of classroom study on human rights and 20 hours on the
outdoor track.

The track takes a patrol through 10 scripted skits, such as
approaching a peasant hut, capturing wounded rebels, dealing with
farmers suspected of sympathizing with rebels and facing peasants
staging peaceful demonstrations.

Soldiers role-play

Soldiers act out assigned roles and are quizzed at the end of each
scene.

"Did any of the soldiers carry out any experiments on the prisoners?
asks one quiz.

One Western diplomat who has toured the Tolemaida course said the
skits and classroom instruction seem to be "an excellent way to drive
home the point that fighting an effective war is fighting a clean war.

"We understand that to the extent that we do protect the human rights
of combatants and civilians, we will be doing our jobs more
efficiently, Gen. Sanchez Vargas said.

But visitors to Tolemaida saw several hints that at least some
military officers still consider human rights more of a guerrilla
propaganda tool than a legitimate issue for the armed forces.

All the "enemies portrayed in the skits were leftist guerrillas,
labeled "narco-terrorists. None belonged to the paramilitaries,
described by several officers on the tour by the more positive term of
"self-defense units.

One skit featured farmers on strike being interviewed by a journalist
from "CNN International, a sly dig at foreign correspondents often
accused by the military of exaggerating security force and
paramilitary abuses while downplaying guerrilla violations.

Old views die hard

A senior army officer along on the tour last week made it clear, in an
off-the-record chat with The Herald, that he viewed the human rights
issue in a way different from what the soldiers were being taught on
the course.

"In this situation, the worst thing is the politicization, that
through the communications media this issue has become politicized.
That's the important part of all this, the officer said.

Growing distraught as the chat continued, the officer said he had
spent "the last two days rebuilding the body of a soldier, dismembered
by guerrillas, so that the family would have something to bury.

"This is a very dirty conflict, said Malcolm Deas, a British historian
whose area of expertise is Colombia. "It is not impossible, but it is
not going to be easy to improve the human rights situation.